New Children’s Hospital (NCH) Perth
Western Australia (WA) Wait Awhile!
The Project
The New Children’s Hospital Perth has been in construction since Jan 2012 and is the largest structural project JHG has undertaken at A$1.2Bn. This is the same project as Nik West but I will be looking at the services not concrete, however since Nik left the project it has changed quite a lot. They are still pouring concrete for a project which is due to be finished next summer! However the services are at full steam ahead. I am lucky enough to spend most of my hours in the basement, which the only benefit is its slightly cooler! I work with one other guy and we are responsible for all the services within the basement, we have split the basement in two, I have responsibility for one half which is East and West block which can be seen in the following picture as the blue and red areas.
As you can seen from the pic it includes two substations, LV and HV, one large Hydraulics room including reverse osmosis, grey water treatment room, pneumatic tube room, fire pump room, multiple air handling rooms and all the services which connect them to say the least. My initial challenges are getting a full understanding of everything in each room therefore I can actually ensure everything is done correctly. My role is Services Coordinator which basically means everyone asks us everything about the services!!
So after my chat with my boss he said “Ollie the corridor of death is 6 weeks behind this is your challenge” the following pic is the corridor it will probably be a small focus of most of my blog’s as its the main artery of all the services. This is how it looks now:
At present fairly sparse, with only wet fire (sprinkler system), fire main, Very Early Smoke Detection Alarm (VESDA) and some drainage. The hardest thing is the project is run using a BIM 3D model to ensure clash detection but not everyone one has bought into it, so we use the model but also have to do it by hand having discussion groups with the contractors and de-conflicting. I will go into more detail with the BIM modelling in the future. The following is a cross section of the corridor:
As you can see its busy and a lot to go in.
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Ollie, fascinating…..the hospital services corridor of doom, I hope you can remember back to Medway Hospital?!! The BIM cross section looks like there are already a few clashes to deal with, it doesn’t look like medical gases have been accounted for yet, presumably there’ll be some?
On thefire side how effective will the sprinkler coverage be with the amount of obstructions below each head? From the model it looks like there will be a few continuous pipe runs below so lots of things to heat up before some serious heat gets to the sprinkler heads, and then nice collection points to spoil the water coverage. Presumably the VESDA is an aspirated system, same question again with the services runs, how is. It predicted to perform?
Final observation is you and Tim appear to be having different experiences with acceptance of BIM yet work for the same Company………discuss!!
Mark
Mark, yep I remember the Medway corridor, pretty busy.
The section of corridor I was demonstrating does not have medical gas running through it, they join slightly further down. The clash detection is an interesting concept. The majority of the subcontractors have fully modelled their pipes to ensure they do not clash. One sub-contractor Wet-Fire has not modelled any of his pipes and has decided to put in early and hope it works and when he gets asked to move his pipe he sucks up the cost which he would of used to pay modellers.
The VESDA system is yes an aspirated system and it has been designed and deemed best suited to be above all services. In terms of future maintenance this I feel would be an very difficult/impossible task! The Wet fire sprinkler system is in fact above and below the services. At present you can only see the top level of the sprinkler system.
In terms of JHG and BIM this is the first project in WA that has used BIM lets say they are a little behind this side. My overall thoughts are, this is an amazing project but has been rushed and too little time spent on design, considering parts of the basement are still being designed and some areas there are just no designs!!
Ollie